Epitafio: A Poetic Meditation on Love, Death, and Memory by Rodrigo Palacios

« Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange ! »

— Stéphane Mallarmé, Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe

Epitafio  

…Dulcinea, if no one else does it first, 

Go in earnest, when you sleep a purple, injected dusk, 

To our fraudulent, abstracted, dilated sea,’

Without lowering yourself to a mere tear or nostalgia

 Go and writ in your dream these signs on the awaiting scarlet

 Waves, which, in the end, like any others, will be forgotten, 

As such is the destiny of all things:

  “O  Black Herald,

who, from the start, died, like poetry itself,

impoverished and forgotten

 in a downpour on a Friday afternoon in Paris,

after you had  previously remembered

 
Your own death by love”